In September I moved to the beautiful island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. I recently started work on revamping the ICT curriculum, and am currently looking at a blank piece of paper surrounded by piles of reading material. What would you do?
With the lack of colour ink & printer access here on St Helena, I'm having to get slightly more creative with the use of our laserjet printers & all the coloured paper I can lay my grubby little hands on. [...]
I'm pretty sure the majority of people following this blog or my Twitter feed will know that I have a new job on the tiny island of St Helena in the south Atlantic. I've been employed as an Advisory Teacher of ICT, with responsibility for some curriculum development across the 11-18 secondary school and its feeder primaries, as well as doing my usual stuff in the classroom. [...]
Ever felt like teaching was an uphill struggle? So does everyone else, but impossible it's not - we just need to consider carefully our definitions of the word success. People who say it's impossible to be an extraordinary teacher are part of that uphill struggle, making goals seem more difficult to achieve, but it is possible.
As part of a presentation at an SSAT seminar entitled 'How to make ICT the most popular subject in your school', here is my presentation - pushing ICT lessons beyond their original definition as we look at the history of war, from an ICT perspective.
In the 4th century BC the Ptolemies of Alexandria began throwing money at the arts. They did not make the same distinctions between fields of study as we do today, and housed scholars from all disciplines together in the "Muses' birdcage," blurring the lines between otherwise disparate disciplines. I think this should be the role of ICT in the modern curriculum.
Aside from pontificating at the front of a classroom, hands down my favourite thing about teaching is developing schemes of work. I find there’s something extremely satisfying in developing a project that forms part of a larger whole, knowing its place within that whole, and knowing what else is needed in order to guarantee a good coverage of skills.
Assessing Pupil Progress was introduced in 2010 to supplement the level descriptors for ICT, and I like it. I'd never, ever print out A3 copies of the assessment criteria and give them to the kids, but as a tool for planning out a curriculum, APP is great.
March's pick of the top links for ICT teachers.
In the second leg of my plan to come up for air after a manic few months, I’m hoping to kickstart the blog back into action, after my recent return to Twitter. I now have the time to focus on the things I’ve had to neglect for a few months, so here’s a brief taster of what’s incoming: A major update to the content of Some Rights Reserved is incoming over Easter, now...